Microsoft: Office 15 – Not 2010 – To Be Fully OOXML Compliant

Alex Brown, the convener of ISO’s OOXML subcommittee (SC34), criticized Microsoft last week for failing to properly support the standard in Office 2010. Brown declared that Microsoft’s office format was “heading for failure” due to the growing number of unresolved technical deficiencies and Microsoft’s own apparent lack of interest in implementing ISO’s revised version of the standard. Microsoft technical evangelist Doug Mahugh responded on Wednesday in an effort to clarify Microsoft’s intentions for OOXML support. He said that Microsoft is strongly committed to the standard and plans to achieve full compliance with the ISO-approved specification. He explained that Microsoft was unable to support strict OOXML compliance in Office 2010 due to various logistical issues and time constraints.

30 Comments

That is what they could offer if they are serious. That the feature will come in a service pack.

I guess MS is not serious.

Because Microsoft doesn’t want to introduce disruptive changes half way through a release cycle. They should have met the 2010 deadline but at the same time do you really want a half assed implementation that is riddled with bugs?

OOXML files are created and read, but the support isn’t fully compliant with the standard. At least that’s what I understood from this statement

[quote]

criticized Microsoft last week for failing to properly support the standard in Office 2010. Brown declared that Microsoft’s office format was “heading for failure” due to the growing number of unresolved technical deficiencies and Microsoft’s own apparent lack of interest in implementing ISO’s revised version of the standard.

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ie, MS Office supports a proprietary version of the standard, and it hasn’t been updated to the official ISO standard.

So we’ll have a mess of non-standard compliant and standard compliant files. That’s really great.

But no, in reality MS type will be set as standard. And standard-compliant become incompatible.

Like a typicall MS-“flavour” product, each version of that is not compatible with others (without any reason), it will cause a lot of headache.

In an ideal world only used feature set must limit the file compatibility.

A clue for the clueless; there isn’t a single office suite out there on the market that 100% conforms to the ODF specification – not even OpenOffice.org does that yet. Maybe you can start acting like a smartass when at least one office suite 100% conforms to the ODF specification.

No they don’t eat their own dogfood. “Dogfood” in this case is a standard that is intended for everyone’s use. What they are eating right now was never inteded for anyone else’s use. Not for public consumption. The standard is not being used by their products. They are eating prime rib, after spending a lot of time and effort trying to get everyone to agree to eating their dogfood. If there are some logistical reasons why you can’t eat the dogfood now, tell people before you dig into the prime rib.

Only explaining themselves after its obvious they don’t intend to eat dogfood for another couple of years, leads to mistrust. You should always eat your dogfood for a good period of time before releasing it for public consumption. Not the other way around, as it appears Microsoft is doing.

If you’re used to mindless corporate bashing which is common on tech blogs then you’ll probably have a hard time with some of my posts.

As for Microsoft they currently use an open format by default which is a massive advantage to competitors compared to the .doc days. A bigger problem is that Sun and now Oracle isn’t funding OpenOffice at an adequate level. It’s still being treated like a hobby project and in that context all these ISO discussions mean very little. No one is really challenging MS office which is a bigger problem. What the hell is IBM doing with Lotus? They’re sitting on billions in cash and yet they just pussyfoot around when it comes to office software.

I don’t get what the big deal is.. if it was indeed a time constraint.. then why is there such a big stink made over it?

Office is a massive project, second only to Windows..and it has a very monolithic development cycle with a lot of moving parts. I don’t see why there is such a big issue given that other Office suites already implement Ecma-376 which works in 2007/2010.

I don’t get what the big deal is.. if it was indeed a time constraint.. then why is there such a big stink made over it?

Office is a massive project, second only to Windows..and it has a very monolithic development cycle with a lot of moving parts. I don’t see why there is such a big issue given that other Office suites already implement Ecma-376 which works in 2007/2010.

Governments often mandate that their information is stored in a standards-compliant way. It is a matter of sovereignty. No government can be beholden to the good graces of a mere company in order to be able to access its own data. Governments want no sole-source providers.

Microsoft wants to be in this game, but its Office formats are designed to be insanely complicated (resistant to reverse engineering). These formats are the antithesis of “standards” (because standards are actually meant to promote interoperability, and eliminate sole-source suppliers). In any sane world, Microsoft Office formats are totally unsuitable for use by governments.

So there has been a charade going on for a number of years now where Microsoft is trying to push through its essentially proprietary, non-inter-operable formats as ISO standards. After gaming the ISO system, Microsoft got a version of its Office file formats (Ecma-376) accepted, with caveats. Basically, an interim version was accepted (essentially the current .docx formats), because Microsoft promised to address the concerns raised by the ISO, and make a more palatable version which would become ISO standard 29500. Then governments could use it. Ecma-376 is NOT ISO 29500.

There is no sign of any current software that conforms to ISO 29500. Microsoft likes to pretend that its current .docx format (Ecma-376) is ISO 29500, when it isn’t. Microsoft is selling Office software to governments based on the fact that the software is standards compliant, and therefore suitable for use by the governments own rules. This is pure misrepresentation by Microsoft.

There are a growing number of governments that are moving away from Microsoft formats, because they are starting to realise now that “a leopard never changes its spots”.

What’s the alternative really? ODF? Is ODF really that much better? From what I’ve read it’s extremely vague in a lot of places, and has the same pitfalls that OOXML has/had “Do X feature like OOo does it”.

It’s just one big fairy tale to suggest that either standard is ideal, but they are standards. The differences between them are not

As for Microsoft selling Office to Governments, in short, they couldn’t at first. However, Office 2007 SP2 implements native support for ODF.

What I’m trying to find out, is how exactly does this affect the normal, everyday user? Governments including the United States have stated that OOXML and ODF can indeed coexist as standards, and has a few reservations about OOXML which will no doubt be address ed if they have not been addressed already.

If OOXML is a worse standard than ODF, the degree to which it is can be nothing more than marginal. Try looking at various suites which claim to support ODF. Yeah.

ODF predates OOXML, OOXML came later and offers nothing of real value that ODF doesn’t have. The responsible thing would have been to contribute to a new version of ODF rather than to create a new incompatible duplicate standard. This only wastes everyone’s time.

If ODF says “do something like OOo”, while inexcusable, this isn’t as bad as “do something like msoffice xx” because you actually have a hope of seeing the source code to the former and working out what it’s doing. It’s not unusual for standards to have reference implementations to fill in any blanks in the standard documentation itself.

ODF is developed by multiple organizations in a fairly democratic process that anyone is free to join, OOXML is developed and controlled by a single for-profit company who will always put their own interests first at the expense of anyone else.

ODF predates OOXML, OOXML came later and offers nothing of real value that ODF doesn’t have. The responsible thing would have been to contribute to a new version of ODF rather than to create a new incompatible duplicate standard. This only wastes everyone’s time.

ODF was created with OOo in mind. OOXML was created with Office in mind. You can clearly see the differences, and it’s probably not fair to force Microsoft to shoe horn what amounts to years of Office features and backwards compatibility into an at the time brand new standard.

Sure they could have proposed changes to ODF, but it’s a similar dilemma they faced when designing WPF/Silverlight around XAML instead of HTML/SVG/XUL. While they probably could have, none of the existing standards really did what they needed quite right.

I much prefer they develop their own, open, and extensively (to the point of absurdity..) documented standard instead of bastardizing (embrace extend extinguishing) an existing one.

If ODF says “do something like OOo”, while inexcusable, this isn’t as bad as “do something like msoffice xx” because you actually have a hope of seeing the source code to the former and working out what it’s doing.

I agree. However like you said, it is still inexcusable. It makes the jokes levied towards OOXML for being thousands of pages long seem silly now. I’ll take extreme verbosity and detail over vagueness any day.

ODF is developed by multiple organizations in a fairly democratic process that anyone is free to join, OOXML is developed and controlled by a single for-profit company who will always put their own interests first at the expense of anyone else.

OOXML is developed by the ECMA and ISO for their respective versions of the standard.

Proof of this being that the ISO version exists purely because it changed the ECMA version of the standard.